Saturday, November 22, 2008

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but from what I've read, its two to three years from the time we check-out 'til the corruption and chaos endemic to Islamic societies thrusts another strong man back into control; so in other words, it'll be back to the future then. But for now, I guess, let's just toss one back and bar-b-q some ribs. I'm good with some fireworks, too. So, without further ado:

Let us honor the sacrifice, dedication and sheer determination of American, coalition and Iraqi troops who have brought freedom to the nation and people of Iraq.

Although our governments have chosen to not name any official day marking the end of this war, we the people have taken it upon ourselves to commemorate November 22, 2008 as the day of victory over the forces of tyranny, oppression and terror in Iraq.

Join fellow bloggers and other members of the public in this virtual ticker-tape parade for our brave troops, to celebrate their success, to remember the fallen, and to declare, in the words of President John F. Kennedy (RIP):

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Friday, November 14, 2008

Because it's important to keep in mind the insidious nature of Islam's core beliefs with respect to the non-Islamic world, I am lifting the quote below from the web page of Sheikh Muhammad Saleh al-Munajjid, a Saudi Wahhabi cleric discussing the nature and need for jihad. This is small piece of a recent exposition on the subject, compliments of Jihad Watch. The sheikh's website is quoting from a classic, mainstream Islamic text which is discussing the onset of the Arab armed invasion of Sasanian Persia in the 630's C.E. The "mushrikeen" are the non-Muslims who are considered idolators by the Muslims, e.g., the Zoroastrians (Persian fire-worshippers) in this case. Chosroes was the Persian emperor who received Mohammad's letter "inviting" him to embrace Islam or pay the penalty. Effectively, the last one, although he was succeeded by his ill-fated grandson Yazdgard in 628. Jizyah is the money you pay to the Muslims in return for being allowed to keep your own religious identity (and your life).

This purpose of jihad was present in the minds of the Sahaabah (may Allaah be pleased with them) during their battles with the enemies of Allaah. Al-Bukhaari (2925) narrated that Jubayr ibn Hayyah said: ‘Umar sent people to all the regions to fight the mushrikeen… so ‘Umar recruited us and appointed al-Nu’maan ibn Muqarrin to lead us. When we were in the land of the enemy, the representative of Chosroes (actually Yazdgard III, n.b.) came out to us with forty thousand troops. An interpreter stood up and said: “Let one of you speak to me.” Al-Mugheerah said: “Ask whatever you want.” He asked, “Who are you?” He (al-Mugheerah) said: “We are some people from among the Arabs. We used to lead a harsh and miserable life, sucking on animal skins and date stones because of hunger, wearing clothes made of camel and goat hair, worshipping trees and rocks. While we were in this state, the Lord of the heavens and the earth, exalted be His name and glorified be His greatness, sent to us a Prophet from amongst ourselves, whose father and mother we know. Our Prophet, the Messenger of our Lord, (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), commanded us to fight you until you worship Allaah alone or pay the jizyah. Our Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) told us the message from our Lord, that whoever among us is killed will go to Paradise to enjoy delights such as no one has ever seen, and whoever among us is left will become your master.”

This is the truth that the Sahaabah and leaders of the Muslims proclaimed in their military campaigns.

For those who need a reminder that there are still devoted and pious Muslims acting on the jihad imperative, and that they are the ones who decide what is and what is not Islamic, I offer you the photo to the left. "Composition with pistol and Quran"

Thursday, November 06, 2008

So says commentator Claudia Rosett in this piece in Forbes.com, in regard to the creed and concept of liberty:

In the American system built around that creed, the monstrous original failing and contradiction was the institution of slavery. America paid for that with a civil war, followed by another century in which, finally--about the time of Obama's childhood--segregation and discrimination began to give way to the equality and opportunities that Obama has now surfed to the presidency. Liberty prevailed.

The irony is that Obama arrives at the threshold of the White House steeped in ideas that subordinate individual freedom to the collective.

In his campaign and his victory speech, Obama declares that America's "timeless creed" is now, "yes, we can." This is not a defense of liberty. It is a declaration so malleable and generic that it could have applied to anything from Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution to the Little Engine that Could.

Obama has called repeatedly upon America's people to sacrifice. What's not yet clear is whether this will entail sacrifice in the common defense of liberty, or whether it is liberty itself that will step by step be sacrificed in the name of the common good. If the latter, the implications are indeed world-changing. For the past century, America has stood as the world's great bulwark of freedom. That can no longer be taken as a given. Americans will be hard pressed to support freedom elsewhere if they do not protect it at home.

If Rossett is right, the U.S. may be seen to be in, or entering an historical phase analogous to the time of Julius Caesar and his nephew, heir, and creator of the Roman Empire, Augustus Caesar, in the sense that the fear and apprehension in the people, with leaders willing to exploit it, can lead to the willing abandonment of principles previously considered timeless and unchanging. The extinction of the old Roman Republic was not so much an overthrow of the old order, but rather the deliberate, albeit improvisational, replacement of an existing system from within: the creation of a a new, less-free political amalgamation centered around a cult of personality, all the while using the rubric and structures of the old system to neutralize and dismantle itself. By the time Augustus was done, little of the old system but the formalities, titles, and rubric remained. What had once been a vigorous republican government was left with little more than empty forms and pious ceremonies. Yet, if one were to ask the average Roman of the time, he would have insisted, of course, that Rome was a republic, despite the vast and obvious increases in the powers of the government at the expense individual freedom, and the pointedly public quashing of dissent, if only because Augustus told them so (well, he also provided them with free food and cash donations from the treasury).

It's going to be difficult to gin up much excitement about the concept of liberty if it's defined by the governing class to be in opposition, as well as a risk to the people's meal ticket.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Secretary General? In what office does Mr. Obama belong? Do the citizens of the U.S.A. really want a president who puts a phantasmagorical one-world agenda ahead-of and into potential opposition to their own interests? Ahhh, but Barack Obama has a dream. And the world has a fever. A fever dream. A vegan, bike-path, soft-power fever dream. And only the state can perfect us. Amen. Merci beaucoup. You will join the global village. No drilling. No resource-consuming children. Back-off America, the planet will be saved. "People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time." For smugness.

Monday, May 19, 2008

An interview with U.S. Army Lt. Col. Joseph Meyers offers some well-needed clarity of condition to those of us who constantly wonder how the U.S. can be so bumblingly stupid and inept from top to bottom in this war, despite all the good advice available. Meyers, to his credit, and like Gen. George S. Patton before him is a student of military history, but he, unlike the sob-sisters at the Dept. of State is pursuing his studies down the dark and pustulent alleys of the history of jihad warfare as promulgated by Muslims--a field of study all but neglected by his peers and his betters. Col. Meyers was interviewed recently by Matt Korade at Congressional Quarterly, Inc. An excerpt follows, but for Christ's sake read the whole dang thing.

"The enemy we’re facing in the war on terror, al Qaeda, says they are fighting a jihad against the West to establish the faith of Islam. Now, if that’s their doctrine, then arguably that is the doctrine that we template, irrespective of whether their interpretation of jihad or their discussion of Islam within the theological community of Muslims is correct or incorrect; that is irrelevant to our discussion and understanding of how the enemy presents his doctrine to us, and it is his doctrine that we template over the terrain.

In the Cold War with the Soviet Union, we templated their military forces over physical ground. In the context of this irregular war or the long war, we have to template this enemy’s doctrine over the human and cultural terrain. That’s when these human, cultural, historical factors will then shape the doctrine and explain to us how it may or may not manifest itself all around the world. And we do say we’re in a global war on terror, so that means not just Afghanistan, not just Iraq, it means right here in the United States.

As a military officer, I try to think strategically and speak strategically. These are important strategic-first questions that I think we have to answer. If you were to deconstruct, for example, our national security documents on national security strategies, the national military strategic plan for the war on terror . . . and try to define the enemy in the war on terror from those documents, you cannot do it. It is obscure, it is ephemeral. Consequently I think it’s very hard to orient courses of action against an enemy that we have not precisely defined. We have to define the enemy, who and what he is, and generally speaking, in the Cold War we were very clear on that with the Soviet Union, because we knew who they were intellectually, philosophically, we understood Soviet strategic culture, we understood the history of the Soviet Union, and we understood their authoritative published doctrine. And we haven’t published the authoritative doctrine of the enemy in the war on terror. We focus on al Qaeda and violent actors, we focus at the tip of the spear to prevent terrorist attacks on the homeland. We are orienting all our resources, intelligence, homeland defense, against preventing attacks. We have very few resources, in my view, oriented on everything that leads up to the point of attack — the radicalization process. And because we don’t have a model for the war on terror, we don’t fully even understand what that radicalization process looks like. What is the infrastructure of it? Who’s involved in it? What is the ideology undergirding that radicalization process? So we still, I would argue, seven years into the war on terror, have big gaps in our strategic thinking about the fight we’re in. I think those gaps explain some of the challenges we are facing in the prosecution of this war, such as, at least from what I’ve read in media sources, strategic communications programs."

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Sorry, girls. In support of Israel and the West, and in unwavering opposition to the Muslim theocrats of Iran, and all of the Mahdi well-watchers, behind every tree or under whatever rock they may be hiding, may they be damned for all eternity and may all the great apes and monkeys they despise as unclean dance upon their graves at the first sighting of the crescent moon forever.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

How cool is that? A bronze "dupondius" issued by the Roman warrior emperor Trajan (98-117) dating to between 103 and 111 C.E. Trajan led his Roman armies into battle himself. The body armor here depicted is referred to as a cuirass. The Roman dominions were taken to their greatest geographical extent by Trajan and remained relatively stable for about 50 years. The philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius died of old age in 180 C.E. defending Trajan's conquests in Germany after fighting Parthians and Germans for most of his career.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Listening to the radio tonight on the way home from work I heard Hillary Clinton (I guess she was somewhere in Indiana) stumping for the highest office in the land. In a brief radio-clip sound-bite I heard her shouting this applause line, "We need a president who will take care of you, a president who will take care of your family" followed by--the applause. A few hours later, just a few minutes ago, in fact, I came across this coin, an ancient bronze medallion, while doing a little numismatic research. Medallions, then as now, were commemorative pieces, issued to celebrate important events. This particular medallion, struck and issued in 350 A.D. was distributed to his close associates by Constantius II, a son and the successor of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who ruled from 307 to 337. Constantius consolidated the power accrued by his father and furthered his new phase of Roman governance, now referred to by historians as the "Dominate", as opposed to the "Principate", which was the form of goverment established by the emperor Augustus, some 380 years earlier. The Dominate threw aside all pretense of republican or democratic forms. Instead the emperor consolidated to his person virtually all power; he was the commander-in-chief of the army, he directed the administration of the government bureaus, he issued laws as the chief legislator, and sat in trials as judge and jury. In short, he was AVTOCRATOR: the govenment personified, and holder of all power. For tax purposes, his subjects across the vast Roman empire, which streched from Britain to Syria, were bound under penalty of death to the land they were born on and bound to the craft or profession of their father, regardless of their hopes and aspirations. The social contract was simple: the land holders, farmers and merchants paid their taxes into the Emperor's purse and the Emperor's indigent urban clientele were paid off for their support and acquiescence. You see it here in this coin. The inscriptions read:

DN CONSTAN-TIVS PF AVG: Draped and cuirassed profile of the emperor, wearing a laurel and rosette diadem. On the coin's reverse it reads: LARGI-TIO: The emperor, diademed, in ceremonial robes, enthroned facing, wearing a large belt decorated with jewels, his feet on a footstool, holding a mappa (an attribute of legislative authority) in his left hand; with his right hand he drops coins into the folds of a robe extended to him by Res Publica, who stands turreted and bowed; to his right, Roma standsfacing,helmeted, wearing a tunica, her head turned towards the emperor around whose shoulders she puts her right arm, in her left hand she holds a spear.

This, of course, is like the fascism of Mussolini or Hitler. In this coin we see the image of an all powerful, benevolent government designed to take all, in order order to bestow all; the utopian bringer of constant peace and and eternal satisfaction. A steady-state concept of governance, in fact, not unlike modern liberalism, wherein each citizen is to play his or her fixed role in the wheel of life, where all the errant affairs of men must be restored by law to a preconceived notion of balance and perfection and the even the climate of the earth itself must be measured, fixed and constrained to the purposes of government.

D(ominvs) N(oster) CONSTANTIVS P(ius)F(elix) AVG(vstvs): Our Lord Constantius, Dutiful and Good AugustusLARGITIO: Generous rewards from the government, freely given (largesse or bounty), Res Publica are the the people. Roma signifies the condign authority of the state.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Paul Krugman beats around the bush, perhaps unable to commit the heresy, but you have to ask yourself, why can't the Democrats commit? Instead, he wonders about the Democatic Party's message, as he contemplates the recent Obama deflation:

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election? That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover. But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn’t mesh well with claims to be bringing a “new politics” and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties. (My italics).

It seems to me, the last time a major candidate for the presidency of the U.S. was doing by saying what Mr. Krugman observes in Obama's political statements, that candidate was 3rd party candidate Ross Perot. The Democrats are surely ripping themselves to shreds this season, but are they perhaps finally sundering the great coalition of Roosevelt and Johnson? Are we witnessing the death of the Dems as we have known them as they give birth to a new party from within their ranks? I think there's a good chance that we are. Coalescing around the leftist anti-U.S. imperialism fantasies, the global warmist hysteria and their dreams of America as a parlimentary democracy centered in a stronger U.N., Obama's youthquake of intellectuals may be "totally" about to spin away into its own political orbit. If so, they will certainly be well financed. Yet, should this occur it will still remain to be seen what happens to the old Clinton "New Democrats", as they will certainly not be re-inhabiting the White House.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

As usual, the American media gets it 180 degrees wrong. The bombers and gunslingers of islam continue to run interference for "moderate islam" (like CAIR and the MAS) while running circles around our guys. Our guys in the media are oblivious to it all, of course, harping instead about trivialities and accidentals. The children of islam; in palestine, in Jordan, in Iran, In Dubai, in Saudi Arabia, (and all the other arabias, as well) in Egypt, in Indonesia, etc., etc., are taught their transcendent islamic history while our children are being taught "current events". Journalists love this, thrive on it, in fact, because it is, seemingly, all they know as well. They bring up the Beirut barracks bombing, as history, but to Osama and Nasrallah and Mahmoud, that's just current events. Michael Hirsch, in Newsweek, for instance:

"Once again timorous Democratic advisers behind the scenes are hoping they can run mainly on the ailing economy. While their candidates are urging an end to George W. Bush's war in Iraq, they are terrified of questioning the larger premises of his "war on terror" or John McCain's redefinition of it as the "transcendent challenge of the 21st century." Today's Dems are, in other words, proving unequal to the task of reclaiming the party's mostly honorable heritage on national security. This view is sadly out of touch, today more than ever. To little notice, Obama's tough, clearly stated position on Bush's war—that it was disastrously misdirected toward Iraq when Afghanistan was always the real front—is becoming conventional wisdom, even among the Bush administration's top security officials, like Defense Secretary Bob Gates andAdm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. During two days of nearly impenetrable testimony on Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador RyanCrocker last week, one answer rang out as clearly as an alarm bell. Under questioning from Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Crocker admitted that Al Qaeda poses a greater threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan than it does in Iraq. No one knows more about this than the ambassador, an Arabic-speaking diplomat who previously served as envoy to Pakistan and whose career practically tells the story of America and the age of terror going back to the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut."

As long as they continue to think about it as "Bush's War" we lose. Just for starters, Iraq is not a war, but merely a battle. Islam's generations are running a relay race into eternity, while our leaders are focused on petulant benchmarks for the Iraqis and cultivating the narcissism of our own electorate. Tragically, the real power is ours, if we only could just seize it and exercise it. We must start by owning our own cultural history and then by standing, unabashedly, on the shoulders of those who have come before us in this fight.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Hugh Fitzgerald in his most recent Iconoclast post notes:"It is not good that the Americans, from Crocker on down and up, appear to be constantly surprised, constantly disappointed, by Arab and Muslim attitudes, inside and outside Iraq, when there is nothing to be surprised or disappointed about. The Sunni regimes have a different interest from that of the Americans: they wish to keep the Americans in Iraq as long as possible, whatever the toll it takes on those Americans, and for several reasons. First, as long as the Americans are there, the Shi'a cannot completely solidify their hold on Baghdad, historically the first city of Islam. Things remain, or seem to remain, still up in the air, as long as the foreign Infidels are present.

Second, once the Americans leave, the Sunnis of western and northwestern Iraq will be confronted with the Shi'a ascendancy in Baghdad, and realize that the Shi'a have no intention of honoring any promises made about their treatment, their equitable sharing in oil revenues for example, that may have been made, as part of Maliki's miching mallecho, to the ever-trusting Americans.

Third, it will now be the direct responsiblity of the Arab Sunni regimes to help their co-religionists in Iraq, and that costs money, and men, and war materiel. It was so much more pleasant to see the Americans stuck in Iraq, trying to stick up for the Sunnis, trying to modify the behavior of the new Shi'a rulers, in an attempt to "unify" the country. "The Country. But is there really a "country" there, and I mean in the Western sense--(and Fitzgerald has made this very point in other contexts)--or is Iraq simply the "land of the two rivers"-- part of the formless, ubiquitous, globe-aggrandizing ummah? If it is axiomatic that Departments of State are designed to deal with states, then who in the government deals with nations, in the classical sense, other than the B.I.A.? Certainly the ummah considers itself a nation, yet not a state. For the ummah to be a state would require a caliph, Allah's vicegerent on earth, and that is not at hand. Perhaps the Department of State would prefer, or would be better equiped to deal with a caliph, so as to better formalize our status with respect to the muslim world. Now there would be a road map and a road they could follow, trudging along in the footsteps of the ancients on their way to an ancient destination. Then we might see the old battles replayed all over again, to the same scripts as of old. Do you suppose the State Department would get it then?

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

This is a touching and warm-hearted piece. I used to watch Red Skelton when I was a kid. He was a gentle man, and funny without being crass or vulgar. What Hollywood was like before the likes of Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin and their ilk.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

This has something to do do with Global Warming--as well as plate tectonics, of course. Am I surprised? Well, yeah. Shocked? Not in the least. Politics vs. nature--and how does nature fight back? Well, not at all. Nature ignores politics, always and forever. That's one of the beauties of nature I find so compelling.

I am continually dismayed by the rigid dogmatism of the narcissistic environmental community. They have a pathologically rigid view of life and and of history. No room for mystery, no room for miracles and no place for the chances that life takes to survive and to persist. Life, life that has flourished and changed for eons without their help. How sad and pathethic they are compared to this colony of penguins!

Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Iconoclast wonders about the "Great Inhibition", which I take to mean the culture of political correctness, in the context of the recent dissembling injunction of the Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith against Dutchman Geert Wilders' groundbreaking production of Fitna-the Movie.

Modern political-correctness was born of the Womyn's Movement; a forced scrubbing-out of the "patriarchal" and "racist" nomenclature of our common cultural inheritance--the inauguration of police officers, firefighters, councilmembers, congresspersons and mail carriers whilst ushering out all of the policemen, firemen, councilmen, congressmen and mailmen. The end of history and the birth of herstory, the end of negroes and the beginning of the endless parade of neologisms designed to replace an inherited vocabulary, however imperfect, that had been developed over historical time to discuss and to cope with common problems and problems in-common. Built essentially upon pretense and wishful thinking, political correctness has, by-and-large enervated our political vocabulary, debilitated our culture's ability to think straight, inhibited reasoned analysis of political problems with historic roots and has cut us off from our intellectual patrimony. Now, against the onslaught of a profoundly not-understood ideology, the "profundity" of which may be lain entirely at the feet of the political correctness movement, The Iconoclast wonders:

"What do the Western scholars of Islam say about the history of Islamic conquest, what prompted it, and what happened to the non-Muslims in the lands that were conquered, over the past 1350 years? Does he know that for a very long period, and especially in that century between roughly 1860 and 1960, before the Great Inhibition, all kinds of Western scholars, German and Dutch and Italian and Russian and English and American and Spanish, studied Islam and the history of Islamic conquest, and their works are not to be ignored nor denied, in the intolerable rush to embrace the assorted espositos and armstrongs, who have nothing like the learning of Schacht, Hurgronje, Jeffrey, Zwemer, Lammens, Dufourcq, and hundreds of others.This kind of thing cannot be endured..."

Update: a quote from the British psychiatrist and commentator Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) on the corrosive effects of political correctness upon societies:

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small…the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

And now, a little something different, for a change. When those nasty Romans weren't out conquering the world, they stayed home, engaging in all manner of domestic pursuits, or they travelled to faraway vacation spots for fun. This little gem was struck during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the 2nd emperor of Rome, and the Caesar mentioned in the Christian Bible's New Testament. Tiberius was himself a notorious debauchee, living in self-imposed and libidinous exile on the picturesque island of Capri, in his cliff-top villa, miles away from Rome. This bronze coin, or token, is 24 mm across, or about the size of a U.S. quarter. It is thought by some that this particular token, and others like it, were used in multi-ethnic brothels, to purchase various services. Just go to the room with the XIII on the door. Thus did the Romans transcend the language barrier. Artfully. It sold at auction in April of 2006 for 15,000 Swiss francs ($11,632.00). Enjoy.

Friday, January 18, 2008

"The honour of Islam lies in insulting kufr and kafirs. One who respects the kafirs dishonours the Muslims... The real purpose of levying jiziya on them is to humiliate them to such an extent that they may not be able to dress well and to live in grandeur. They should constantly remain terrified and trembling. It is intended to hold them under contempt and to uphold the honour and might of Islam."

Sunday, January 06, 2008

The dismissal of analyst Maj. Stephen Coughlin from the U.S. Department of Defense is covered here at Jihad Watch. Maj. Coughlin was one of the most highly placed individuals in the U.S. defense establishment to have a sound, and un-corrupted understanding of the role of jihad warfare in the ideology that is Islam. Now he will be gone, ousted at the behest of muslims who have penetrated the highest reach of our government. How can we even hope to understand the jihadist war being waged against the non-muslim world, let alone emerge victorious when situations like this are allowed to occur or are in fact sanctioned? Just as Sargeant Hasan Akbar tossed genades into the tents of his commanding officers on the ground in Iraq, and when the 911 jihadis drove a 757 into the building, there appear to be muslims attacking the Pentagon, only this time they have been invited in through the through the front door. Is there anyone at the top of our government with a clue? Should we continue to call it the Department of Defense, or could it be better described as the Department of Let's Not Risk Giving Offense?

I guess the pathetic Adam Gadahn, his pal Zawahiri and their ilk have friends in high places.

Update: Jihad Watch has posted an excellent summary of the issues involved in this case. See it here.